gratitude

Last weekend Jan and I celebrated our wedding anniversary. We took a trip to the beautiful Danish island of Bornholm.

It was my first time there and I wasn’t disappointed. Beautiful scenery, tons of history, great food and the time to relax and re-connect, and forget about our busy work lives.

I feel very blessed and thankful to have met Jan. Let’s just say that prior to meeting him, I’d had a chequered love life. I’d had my fair share of draining and dysfunctional relationships and got to the point where I knew enough was enough.

I couldn’t keep getting involved with men who were emotionally unavailable, or domineering bullies or psychologically abusive, or just plain confused, insecure and needy. Like a true people pleaser I had tried to help them all, to the detriment of my wellbeing and self-esteem.

Starting to love myself more opened up space in my life for healthy connections. I stopped dating and began to think about what I really wanted in a relationship and what sort of partner I wanted. I wrote a Wish List. And when I least expected it, Jan walked into a Dublin pub and into my life.

Do you sometimes or often feel like a victim in your life? Well, you if you do, you are certainly not alone.

Feeling like a victim is all to do with our state of mind – our mentality. We think of ourselves as victims, and our thoughts become our feelings and our actions.

When you have a victim mentality you feel as though you cannot succeed no matter how hard you try and that everything and everyone is against you. Feeling like this can be very frustrating as it keeps you stuck.

You feel trapped and helpless and believe you have no control over your life. Your thinking patterns are likely to be negative and very pessimistic. There is also a strong chance that self-pity and sadness are familiar features of your life.

The “benefits” of having a victim mindset

Believe it or not, having a victim mindset is attractive to some people because they believe it holds several benefits, such as:

You’ve probably heard about expressing gratitude as a part of the law of attraction. And it is certainly true that gratitude is an important part of helping us achieve what we want in life as well as gaining more happiness.

After all, how can you possibly attract success and happiness if you do not appreciate what you already have?

Too many people ignore gratitude and instead focus on what they believe they lack, labelling themselves as hard done by or unfortunate. The truth is that all of us have plenty to be grateful for, although this can be hard to think about in difficult circumstances.

An everyday reminder of gifts

Making a gratitude list is a great way to remind yourself of your many blessings. Seeing everything you are grateful for written down in a list is a very effective way to increase your levels of happiness.

Accumulating your blessings makes you realize you are lucky and the good thing about a list is that it’s portable – you can slip it into your pocket and read it whenever you need to.

Expressing gratitude is uplifting, it literally lifts our spirits and opens our hearts. You start to realize that your life contains many gifts and many wonderful people.

It is in our darkest and most difficult times that we need to think about what we are grateful for. At such times, the prospect of writing a gratitude list may seem ridiculous but this one action will be far more productive than self-pity.